About Amanda Rockman
Amanda Rockman is a pastry chef with over 20 years of experience in some of the most demanding kitchens in the country. Raised in Katy, Texas, she trained at the Culinary Institute of America and built her career across San Francisco, Chicago, and Austin. In Chicago, she worked at three Michelin-starred L20 and The Peninsula Hotel, earned the Jean Banchet Pastry Chef of the Year Award in 2011 and 2012, and was named Chicago Tribune’s Pastry Chef of the Year. She returned to Austin in 2015 as Executive Pastry Chef at the South Congress Hotel, eventually rising to Culinary Director of the entire New Waterloo hospitality group. In 2024, she opened Rockman Coffee + Bakeshop in East Austin — her first solo venture, built around lamination, technique, and the kind of standards that only come from two decades of high-pressure kitchen work. She is a James Beard Award semifinalist and defeated Bobby Flay on Beat Bobby Flay in 2018.
Episode Overview
Pastry is one of the most technically demanding disciplines in professional cooking — and one of the least understood by the industry that relies on it. Amanda Rockman has spent over 20 years at the top of it, from three-Michelin-starred kitchens in Chicago to running the entire culinary program for a major Austin hospitality group. In this episode, she and Andre dig into what it actually takes to survive as a pastry chef, why the role is systematically undervalued, how insomnia and physical burnout shape the profession, and what it meant to finally walk away from the institutional kitchen to build something on her own terms.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
The Real Demands of Pastry Work — Why pastry is one of the most technically exacting disciplines in professional cooking, what precision actually looks like on the line at volume, and how the standards required differ from every other kitchen role.
Why Pastry Chefs Get Cut First — How the hospitality industry systematically undervalues and eliminates pastry positions in tough times, what that pattern costs kitchens long-term, and why Rockman decided she had to build something independent to survive it.
Insomnia, Burnout, and the Pastry Schedule — The physical and mental toll of working pastry hours over a long career, how chronic sleep disruption affects performance and decision-making, and what it looks like to manage those realities over decades rather than months.
Running a Culinary Program vs. Running a Kitchen — What Rockman learned as Culinary Director of New Waterloo about leading a portfolio of restaurants versus running a single kitchen, and how that scale changed her perspective on leadership, standards, and what quality actually requires operationally.
What It Takes to Open Your Own Place — The decision to leave an established institutional role to open Rockman Coffee + Bakeshop, what she had to unlearn from corporate hospitality, and what the first solo venture actually demands from a chef with high technical standards.
Ingredient Quality and the Commitment Behind It — How sourcing decisions shape everything downstream in pastry, why shortcuts in ingredients are immediately visible in the final product, and the non-negotiables Rockman built her bakeshop around.
Connect with Amanda Rockman
Instagram: @arockman
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